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Contrary to popular belief, the new Mac Pro is closer in design to an aluminum beverage can than a trash can. (Not that there's anything wrong with trash cans—some of our favorite astromech droids are shaped like trash cans.)

The back side (if a cylinder can have a back side) contains the power button and electrical inlet, as well as a tidy array of ports:

3.5 mm speaker and headphone jacks

Four USB 3.0 ports

Six Thunderbolt 2 ports

Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports

HDMI 1.4 out

Looks like neither trash nor fixer can get in through the top of this bin. Time to investigate that enticing lock switch...

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A view from above: The Mac Pro utilizes a giant triangular heat sink ("Thermal Core"), shared by the dual graphics cards and CPU.

Looks like the Mac Pro has taken some design pointers from the recent AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule bodies: a thin, vertical design with individual boards on separate sides.

We use our spudger to pry the graphics card data connectors from their sockets. This FCI Meg-Array connector is the same type used for the G4 & G5 PowerPC processor daughtercards, and looks to be a fully custom way of hooking up PCI-E, with many pins in a pressed-in connector.

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But wait, there's more. Just one more: a second, slightly different FirePro card.

This GPU—same make and model—hails from Taiwan, unlike its Chinese-made twin.

The other important difference to note is that this card (and only this card) hosts the slot for the SSD. This seems to us like a potential opportunity for expansion—perhaps higher storage configurations make use of two of this variety, for doubling up on SSDs?

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With a rated output of 12.1 Volts and 37.2 Amps, we're looking at a 450 Watt power supply. The power supply has no dedicated cooling, and relies on the main system fan to keep cool—allowing the Mac Pro to idle at a whisper-quiet 12 dBA.

For comparison, we found a 450 Watt PSU in our recent Steam Machine teardown. The Steam Machine's SilverStone power supply featured a "silent running 80 mm fan with 18 dBA minimum."

And a quick look at what's left on the behemoth of a heat sink: Heavy gauge, flat power cables run from the PSU to the logic board and graphics cards, and remain intertwined in the heat sink.

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Mac Pro Late 2013 Repairability Score: 8 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)

For being so compact, the design is surprisingly modular and easy to disassemble. Non-proprietary Torx screws are used throughout, and several components can be replaced independently.

The easily-opened case is designed to make RAM upgrades a snap.

The fan is easy to access and replace.

While it will require a bit of digging, the CPU is user-replaceable—meaning intrepid fixers should be able to save considerably by upgrading from the base-level processor configuration.

There is no room, or available port, for adding your own internal storage. Apple has addressed this with heaps of Thunderbolt, but we'd personally rather use the more widely compatible SATA if we could.

With some proprietary new connectors and tight cable routing, working on this $3,000 device without a repair manual could be risky.

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Комментариев: 48

The microcontrollers on the inside of the port panel must be for the illumination that lights up the ports. Somewhere there's a sensor that knows when you're turning the thing around too. Do they use a MEMS sensor for that?

should be hidden inside the fan, packed together with most of the beamforming antenna array and an extra antenna into the I/O housing Apple got really innovative this time, they managed to squeeze everything into this tiny can